Delayed Announcement, File Attachments Published Immediately

If you post a scheduled/delayed announcement with a file attachment, that attachment is immediately added to Files/unfiled section, where it can be viewed by anyone in the class.

This issue was escalated to us by an instructor who scheduled an announcement to post their midterm, and was unhappy to learn that the file was accessible to students before the time they had scheduled.

I imagine that the primary use of scheduled/delayed announcements is to support the dissemination of time-sensitive information (e.g. scheduling the release of assignment solutions after the assignment is due). For files attached to a scheduled announcement to not follow the same availability schedule as the content of the announcement strikes me as unintuitive.

Here's a screenshot of a scheduled announcement:

The content of the announcement may not be visible, but the attached file will be...

Hello Miles LincolnThank You for posting this information about attachments and announcements. This is quite interesting! I just replicated exactly what you have done and got the same results. I created an announcement in my sandbox course with a delayed date of March 15, 2019. I attached a *.jpg image in the same way you posted your *.jpg image. Lo and behold, my *.jpg image was included in the course "Files" >> "unfiled" folder...ready and waiting for people to download it. So, there are a couple recommendations I can think of:

Hide the "Files" area of the course if students really don't need to access that area. How do I manage Course Navigation links? Instructors can always link to files in their course "Files" via course content pages. But, there may be other reasons why an instructor would want to keep the course "Files" area visible to students.

On a related note, we have also seen that attachments to a section-specific Announcement become visible to all students in the "unfiled" folder of the course Files. This sort of makes sense, given that there is no such thing as section-specific Files in Canvas at this time. However, a better approach that would address both date-restricted and section-restricted Announcement attachments would be to place these in the Canvas Files area in a restricted-access setting, by date and/or by direct link only.